Book turns “Out” upside down

San Diego writer and high schoolteacher Laura Preble’s new young-adult novel, “Out,” turns the world as we know it upside down.

Same-sex couples are in the majority. They control government and religion and have decided, because of unwanted pregnancies and other problems, to make opposite-sex relationships illegal.

Chris Bryant, 17, falls in love with a girl just as his father, an ambitious minister, is arranging a marriage for him with a powerful older man. Following his heart could cost him his life.

Preble will be at Mysterious Galaxy on April 6 at noon. She answered questions by email.

Q: What do you hope your book makes readers think about?

A: I’m a Gay Straight Alliance adviser at West Hills High in Santee, and the mother of a son who is gay. I’ve had to watch while many students and people I know and love are denied the rights everyone else takes for granted. I mean, if straight people can run off to Las Vegas and get married drunk by a guy in an Elvis suit, how is that “honoring” traditional marriage?

What I want people to think about is this: sexual orientation is not a preference. It’s not like choosing the color of your couch or deciding on dinner. It’s like having blue eyes instead of brown, or being born Chinese instead of Swiss. What I really hope to do is to get people in the majority to feel what it would be like to be ostracized for being who they were born to be. I don’t know of any straight people who “decided” to be straight. They just knew.

Q: Why do you call the characters “Parallels” and “Perpendiculars”?

A: I felt that the terms “gay” and “straight” had so much weight in our society. For the metaphor to really work, I felt that I needed to rename them so readers could look at it with a fresh eye. I also really loved the symbolism of the parallel and perpendicular signs. Parallels are the same, Perpendiculars are opposite. I imagined how the crosses in the Parallel-based churches would look: two sets of Parallel lines, but they would inevitably intersect. And then, when you shorten the word “perpendicular” you get perp, which is a derogatory term characters use in the book to tease people, much like some people today use gay slurs.

Q: Why do you have the church controlling the government?

A: My feeling is that churches have no business dictating morals to people outside their own faith, and from what I’ve seen, much of the woes of our culture have stemmed from religious extremists. I’m not saying religion is bad, or that people who are religious are bad. What I wanted to say is that religion can be wrongly used, and it can be a shield for people to do immoral things.

Q: In what ways did your work as a high school teacher and adviser shape the story?

A: Working in a public high school allows me to live in a character lab. I have seen and worked with kids of all walks of life: every religion, ethnicity, quirk, ability, and limit. Although I never pattern characters after my students, many of the things they say and do stick with me.